Learn
Free Libraries
Public-domain books, scanned art, academic archives and collections built by people who cared far too much about one subject. Bring time.
19 sites
The preprint server where most physics, maths and computer science appears long before a journal touches it.
- 1 hr+
Centuries of natural history books scanned page by page, including illustrations nobody has looked at in decades.
- 1 hr+
The French national library's digital collection — manuscripts, maps, newspapers and photographs, millions of items deep.
- 1 hr+
Gigapixel scans from two thousand museums, plus the experiments that let you find your own face in a painting.
- 10 min
Seventeen million scanned volumes from research libraries, with full-text search running across the entire lot.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.
- 1 hr+
A vast and aggressively plain archive of religious and mythological texts, essentially unchanged since the old web.
- 1 hr+
Public domain books read aloud by volunteers, free to download, uneven in quality and endless in supply.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Nine hundred thousand digitised items from the New York Public Library, a large share of it public domain.
- 10 min
A daily index of the free courses, audiobooks, films and ebooks scattered across the rest of the internet.
- 10 min
A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.
- 10 min
Seventy thousand public domain books, plain and free, from the oldest digital library on the internet.
- 10 min
Public domain classics reset properly — typography fixed, typos corrected, covers designed — and then given away.
- 10 min
Story Reader
AltFLong-form serialised fiction with a reader built for actually reading — chapter memory, no pop-ups, no interruptions.
- 1 hr+
Every possible page of text that could ever exist, already written, sitting at a findable address.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A hand-maintained index of free books online, run out of Penn since before search engines were any good.
- 10 min
Essays and picture galleries drawn from the strangest corners of out-of-copyright print, film and illustration.
- 1 hr+
A vast library of freely licensed photos, maps, diagrams and sound files, each with its licence spelled out. The picture shelf behind Wikipedia.
- 1 hr+
The free library of source texts — treaties, speeches and out-of-copyright novels, transcribed and proofread by hand.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Free Libraries: questions
How many sites are in Free Libraries?
19 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 1 of them is an AltF original that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
19 of the 19 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
17 of 19 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 19 are safe for work and 18 work with the sound off.